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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

An Open-Source Network Switch? Facebook Points the Way

Over the past couple of years the Open Compute Project has produced standards for compute servers, racks, and even storage. But what it hadn't done until this week is create an open standard for network switches.

That all changed at the Interop convention this week in Las Vegas when Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's vice president of hardware design and supply chain operations and chairman of the Open Compute Project, announced that Open Compute is indeed working on an open definition for such a switch, which could end up being a major disrupter in the networking market. As such it fits in with other projects to bring more openness to networking, including the Open Flow protocol and the Open Daylight SDN project.

The Open Compute Project has grown out of work Facebook has done in its data centers, but is now run by a larger community effort. Frankovsky said Facebook's newest data center is completely built on Open Compute standards, with older data centers mostly using Open Compute products but still having some legacy equipment. This has given the firm both initial cost and operating expense benefits. The equipment was designed to be easy to service. For instance, he said, everything is accessible from the front of the rack. As a result, Facebook requires only one administrator for every 24,000 servers.

A number of Open Compute solutions providers now make this equipment, including Open Rack-based compute systems and storage systems based on Open Vault (formerly Project Knox) from companies such as Avnet and original design manufacturer Wistron.

But the networking system has been proprietary until now, with announcement of the new project, which will be headed by Najam Ahmad, Facebook's manager of the network team.

When asked how this fits in with Open Flow, Ahmad noted that Facebook is part of the Open Networking Foundation but while that's a mechanism for open networking protocols, it does not define hardware. Instead the Open Compute Project is working to define a switch, an actual piece of hardware. This will be operating system-agnostic, he said, noting he can run traditional protocols or OpenFlow.

The idea, he said, is to disaggregate the hardware and software, as opposed to the traditional appliances that have defined the network switch market. It can run whichever technology or protocol that is relevant.

Frankovsky said the Open Compute Project waited until now to create the switch because it didn't want to be redundant and only decided to do this when the Open Networking Foundation reached out and requested it.

He said the organization will follow a community-based process to decide what to build, but will start with a standard network switch. He hopes the project can have a high-level definition settled in time for a summit meeting scheduled for May 16 at MIT.

Frankovsky said it could take nine to 12 months to create tangible products. This could be Open Rack-compatible switches, or those for traditional data center racks, or both form factors.

The plan is to create a bare-metal network switch and not mandate an operating system; instead it should be open. There will BIOS-type software, but that's about it. Asked what kind of network processing chip will run in such systems, Frankovsky said it will be up to the community.

The project claimed support from a variety of companies and organizations, including Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Facebook, Intel, Netronome, and VMware, as well as the OpenDaylight project (a part of the Linux foundation working on an open source SDN technology stack) and the Open Networking Foundation, which has promoted the OpenFlow protocol.

If this project is successful, it could prove disruptive to the Ethernet switch business, dominated by Cisco and others, just as the Open Compute standards could potentially threaten traditional server makers. But all depends on how well the products work and what the traditional vendors do. For now, this seems aimed mostly at the largest data center organizations but over time, it could impact all sorts of networking installations.

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